


Sometimes You Just Need a Decoder Ring

by kho



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-05-31 23:46:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6492583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kho/pseuds/kho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Set now-ish, because I'd love to see Mary move back to Hawaii now that it's safe to.)</p><p>Danny follows Steve into the kitchen and sticks the beers in the fridge.  “Actually I’m of the mind that it takes two to tango so I don’t know who started and who fueled but you’re both in this fight, so I’m just trying to figure out how to diffuse this situation so I don’t wind up as collateral damage.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sometimes You Just Need a Decoder Ring

Danny opens the door only to be knocked to the side, the beers rattling in their six pack as a flash of blonde barrels into him.  “Well you know what?  I hate you, okay?  So fuck off, you piece of shit, just go fuck yourself alright?!”

“Mary!”

“Don’t fucking _Mary_ me, Steve,” she says, fists clenched by her side as she stomps a foot on the floor.  “You’re not my father, you don’t get to tell me what to do or how to do or why to do and just fucking _fuck off you fucking asshole_!”

Danny blinks at her as she whirls to glare at him.  “Hey Mary, good to see you again.”

“Move out of my way or I will punch you in your dick,” she growls, and he immediately steps to the side and watches her stomp past him on her way to the back yard.

“Damnit, Mary, apologize to Danny, he didn’t do anything! Can you believe her,” Steve shouts, turning wild, crazy, exasperated eyes towards Danny.  “God I can not even _believe_ her, who talks like that?!”

“I find myself reminded that you’ve not met any of my sisters,” Danny says, shaking his head.  “What did you do?”

“What makes you think I did something,” Steve says, crossing his arms over his chest and glaring at Danny.  “Why me? She’s the one that--”

“Okay, okay, all right,” Danny says, holding up his hands placatingly.  “Take a beer, sit down, relax.”

“I’m in the middle of making dinner, and Joanie’s gonna be up from her nap…” Steve rolls his eyes and throws his hands out.  “Though God knows how she slept through that, she’s a mother now you’d think she’d be more responsible, know how to keep her voice down, not talk like that, I swear, the mouth on her!”

“I don’t know, Steve, you have a way of driving a person…”  Danny fades, holding his hands back up.  “Sorry.  I only meant, ya know...  Sometimes you take a person from 3 to a 10 on the annoyance scale pretty quick.”

“Seriously?  Again we’re saying this is my fault?!”

Danny follows Steve into the kitchen and sticks the beers in the fridge.  “Actually I’m of the mind that it takes two to tango so I don’t know who started and who fueled but you’re both in this fight, so I’m just trying to figure out how to diffuse this situation so I don’t wind up as collateral damage.”

“I just told her with Deb being gone it might be best if she moved back in here with me,” Steve says, flipping something on the stove, adding some sort of spice to it.  Danny sniffs the air and decides it’ll most likely be edible.  Chicken something or other.  Kinda hard to screw up.

“Ah,” he says, settling into one of the bar stools.  “So let me guess.  Instead of saying, gee Mar, is there any chance you’d like some help with Joanie and might like to come spend some time with me your loving brother, you said something along the lines of By Order of God, God Being Me Steve McGarrett, I Decree You Move In Here.”

Steve arches an eyebrow at him. “By order of God?”

Danny nods.  “Aka, you.”

Steve blinks.  “By order of _God_?”

Danny nods again.  “You gonna get stuck on my phrase usage or you gonna tell me I’m right?”

“I offered my home to her,” Steve yells.  “I was doing something _nice_!”

“You ordered her to move back here,” Danny says, gesturing.

Steve rolls his eyes.  “Danny, she’d be stupid to not take my offer, okay--”

“Steven, do you remember telling me once upon a crime scene ago there’s an easy way to do things and a hard way,” Danny asks, raising his eyebrows at him.  “Well, babe, you may know the easy island way to deal with the locals, but I know the easy way to deal with sisters, and ordering them around like a well trained German Shepherd ain’t the way to do it.”

“That’s stupid,” Steve grouses, waving a dismissive hand around.  “That’s just… that’s cutting of your nose to spite your face, just because maybe I didn’t approach it in the right way it’s still the right thing to do for her to move back in here with Joanie, it’s just stupid to stomp her feet and huff off about it!”

“Yes that is rather childishly stubborn,” Danny agrees.

“Thank you,” Steve says, turning to face him, smiling.  “Finally!”

“You know who else can be quite stubborn and childish, Steven?”  Danny pointes to him.  “You, my friend.  Pot, kettle, all kinds of blackness.  Black all over the place.”

Steve crossed his arms across his chest.  “Hey!”

“Do you know what I had to do the last time you faced off against Wo Fat and came back torn up and spit out and black and blue?”  Danny waves his arms around until Steve looked back at him.  “I literally, _literally_ , had to crush up tramadol in to your applesauce to get you to take it.”

Steve’s mouth worked open several times.  “Danny, you _dosed_ me?"

“Damn straight I dosed you, and I’d do it again,” Danny yelled, pointing at him.  “You were keeping yourself awake like a crazy person, going on 42 hours of no sleep, keeping me awake with you mind, and a body needs sleep, Steven!  It needs it, _needs it_ , to heal!”

“Danny!”

“So I tried the hard way, I reasoned with you, I begged you, I threatened you, I wrestled you for it, but in the end, yeah… I crushed the fucker up and put it into some applesauce.”  He shrugs.  “Good enough for Grace, good enough for you.”  

Steve squints over at him.  “I don’t know if I can ever trust you again!  Next time I need a babysitter you are barred from my house!  Kono’s doing it.”

Danny snorts.  “Kono’s who brought over the applesauce, fool.”

Steve gives Danny a choice finger and then turns back around to stir whatever is happening in his pots and pans.  “Friendship, honesty, trust,” he grumbles. “Right out the damn window, I tell ya.”

“I’m gonna go see if Hurricane Mary has blown over,” Danny says, standing up and grabbing two beers.

“Batten down the hatches, pal, she don’t blow over so easy,” Steve calls after him.

“They never do,” Danny yells back, and then lets himself out the sliding door to the back yard, spotting Mary parked on the beach with the wind blowing in her hair and her feet dug into the sand.  “Are we in a tampon commercial?”

She snorts and looks up at him.  “Yeah, yeah, everything always winds up seeming cliche in Hawaii. Just need some mood music to complete the ambience.”  She looks back out at the ocean.  “So tell me.  Do _you_ ever get that not so fresh feeling, Danny?”

“Let’s move on from that metaphor shall we,” he says, dangling a beer in front of her face and lowering himself to sit next to her in the sand as she takes it.  “Your brother’s an idiot.  You’ll be a much happier person the quicker you just learn to accept that and roll with the punches.”

She snorts and twists the cap off of the bottle.  “You have to deal with him way more than I do, have you managed to accept that?”

He takes a pull of beer and shrugs.  “Sometimes.  About half of the time.”  He see-saw’s his hand.  “To a degree.”

“He’s such a jackass,” she grumbles, swallowing about half of her beer down in three gulps, reaching up to wipe at her mouth with the back of her hand.  “You don’t have to be his apologist, ya know.”

“I’m not,” he says, looking over at her, bumping her shoulder with his.  “You already know he loves you and doesn’t mean any harm.”

“I don’t know, Danny, this time it was kind of blatant,” she says, tucking her hair back behind her ears and wrapping her arms around her bent legs.  “He thinks I’m a bad mother.”

“No he doesn’t.”

She snorts.  “Yes, Danny, he does.”

“Mary, listen, I know he’s pretty bad at words and expressing himself, but he really doesn’t think you’re a bad--”

“He said I have no business doing this on my own,” she spits out, turning to look at Danny, hurt bleeding through her eyes.  “Like I’m torturing my kid, sticking her with just me to raise her.  Like without Deb I’m going to _ruin_ her.”

Danny closes his eyes and bends his head forward.  “Yeah, not the best way to say that, no.”

“To say what,” she yells, throwing her hands out, beer sloshing out of the bottle.  “What could he possibly have been trying to say that doesn’t mean I suck as a mother?”

“That you need help,” Danny says gently.  “That it’s hard.  By yourself, Mary. It’s hard.  It’s too hard.  And you have family in him.  And he wants to help you. Because he loves you.”  

She blinks at him.  “Well.  It would’ve been nice of him to say it that way.”

“And he loves Joanie,” Danny continues, looking back out at the ocean in front of them.  “He’s been having a rough year, Mar.  I’m not sure he realizes that part of the reason he wants you back here so bad is actually for himself.”

Her mouth turns down in a frown.  “Deb?”

Danny nods.  “Your Aunt Deb was hard on him yeah.  Plus Cath leaving.  Again.”

“Yeah, he uh, he told me he was going to propose to her one day and the next said it was done.”  She snorts.  “In a text.  It’s done.  An economy of words, that one.”  She looks up at Danny.  “Does he at least open up to you?  Because I mean.  Like that’s all he said, it’s done.  I even had to ask him what it meant, it’s done like you asked?  When’s the wedding?  And he said no, we’re done."

“Here and there,” he says quietly, crossing his legs to get the pressure off of his knee.  He twists his beer in the sand until it stands up on it’s own.  “In little bits, he’ll occasionally say it sucks.  Or admit it does if I pester him.”

“God, he is so much like Dad it’s ridiculous,” Mary says, rocking forward to unstrap her sandals, throwing them off behind her.  “Why would he want to emulate that man?”

Danny watches her angrily pick through the sand, letting it sift through her fingers before flinging it down the beach.  “I don’t know.  Like father, like son?  He’s probably not even aware if he is emulating him.”

“I guess I just don't get it because, like, I don't have a penis or whatever?”  Mary’s face scrunches up in confusion, looking over at Danny like maybe he can explain it.  “I don't know.  Guys and their dads.   It's ridiculous.”  

Danny laughs.  “You know, I hear daughters and their mothers have a similar thing.”

Mary cackles.  “Yeah, vaginas.”  

Danny smacks a hand to his face.  “Not what I meant, babe.”  

“I know.  Except well hey.  My mother’s dead, except for when she’s not.”  She laughs again, a short angry bitter thing.  “And hey, she’s not here for me to even know her well enough to emulate so.  Ha.”

Danny feels like an asshole.  “Yeah sorry.  I just meant.  I don't know what I meant.”

Mary, unsurprisingly, just blows through it.  “I don't know, it's like he's got this hero worship thing and he idolizes him and it's like God are we even remembering the same man?”  She shakes her head, confusion etched into every line on her face.  “Like okay so there was a reason he sent us away when he did ok… That means he's not still a fucking asshole?”

“No, not really,” Danny says, and then freezes because he doesn’t really know Mary all that well, but he knows Steve, and Steve wouldn’t appreciate Danny calling his father an asshole.

“Right?  I mean, Danny, you got a kid,” she says.  “God she’s what, 10?”

“13.”

Mary nods.  “Okay, so in two years when she’s 15, okay?  Her Mom dies and it’s maybe because some mob guy’s out to get ya’ll or whatever.  Do you ship her off to somewhere else all by herself?”  She throws out her hand and hits Danny on the leg.  “To live with an aunt she barely knows and separate her from her brother and like… never fucking call or come see her?”

Danny shakes his head, because appreciate it or not, he can only tell the truth.  “Never in a million years.”

“Right.  So.”  Mary nods, decisively.  “Still a fucking dick.”

“I don’t know, Mary.  Maybe.   But maybe not.”  Danny takes a deep breath, looking over at her.  “Wrong headed or not, I think maybe he did think he was doing the right thing.  And that doesn’t mean he wasn’t wrong, it doesn’t even mean you don’t have the right or the cause to be pissed.  But.  Maybe he did the best he could?”

“I just don’t know how Steve can forgive so easily,” Mary says softly, and she blinks and one tear falls.  Danny leans his shoulder into hers because he doesn’t know if she’d welcome an arm around her or not.  She smiles and leans back.  “I guess he's just a better person than I am is all. Which hey shocker there.  Like we didn't already know that.”

Danny shook his head.  “Actually, you know what?  I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with you on that.”

She snorts and looks over at him.  “What?”

“He's not a better person than you are Mary.  You're a perfectly fine person.”  He smiles down at her surprised expression.  “I mean I may not know you that well, I’ve never really gotten to spend much time with you, but…   I have a sense about people.  And you're a good person.”

“You have to say that, my brother will kick your ass if you don’t,” she says, but she smiles at him anyway.

“I don’t say things to be nice, Mary.  I say it, I mean it.  And what I’m saying here is, maybe it’s not that he's a better person.”  He quirks an eyebrow at her.  “Maybe it's that you're just more honest with yourself than he is.”

Mary nods, squinting up at the setting sun.  “I dunno Danny.  I'm pretty fucked in the head.”  

Danny laughs.  “I'm not gonna argue on that.  But you know, he is too.  You know that right?”

“Dinner is ready if you two are done commiserating over how much I suck.”

They turn their heads to see Steve walking out to them, shuffling his feet and not looking at them.  Danny looks over at Mary.  “Look at that face and tell me he’s not forgiven.”

Mary stands and reaches down to haul Danny up with surprising strength.  She hip checks him and then walks over to Steve and stabs him in the chest with her fingernail.  “You.  Tell me you love me.”

Steve’s mouth opens a few times.  “What?”

“Tell me,” she says, stabbing him twice more, “you love me.”

He smiles softly down at her.  “I love you, Mary, you know that.”

She points a finger in his face.  “Tell me you want me to move here not _only_ because you want to help me but because you miss me.”

He glances in surprise at Danny.  “Mary.”

“Tell me!”

“I miss you, yes, of course i want you to move here because I miss you _and_ because I miss Joan, _and_ , because I want to help you.”  He steps closer and lifts Mary’s face to look at him.  “Mar, you know I love you right?  Of course I want you here.”

“I’m not moving in here with you,” she says, grinning up at him.  “I’m moving into my own place, I’m not gonna put up with your ninja bullshit and your rules and you trying to impose curfews on me, okay.”

His grin widens.  “But you’re moving here?”

“You’re paying for the movers,” she says, walking around him.  “And you’re going to help me find a job, a job that doesn’t suck,” she calls over her shoulder.

He grins at Danny and smacks him on the shoulder.  “What the hell did you say to her?”

“She just needed to borrow my Steve McGarrett decoder ring,” Danny says, shrugging.  “Where move in because you suck as a mother actually means I love you and I miss you and I want to help you.”

Steve’s grin falters.  “I never said--”

“That’s how she heard it babe,” Danny says, holding up his hands.  “You’re gonna have to figure out how to talk to your sister better one of these days.”  He grins.  “Luckily, you’re gonna have a lot more time to practice now.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, his grin coming back.  “Thanks Danny.”

“Now feed me,” Danny says, walking forward and turning Steve by the elbow, pushing him towards the house.  “What’re we having?”

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr here under [@lovethesnark](http://lovethesnark.tumblr.com). 
> 
> Fanfiction Website  
> MOST of my fic is not on AO3, though all of my H5O and beyond is as AO3 didn't exist yet and it was too much to archive. It can be found on my website at [LoveTheSnark.com](http://www.lovethesnark.com).


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